The Biggest Unsolved Art Heist—and the Detective Who Came Close to Cracking It

By Tim Murphy
At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two policemen demanded to be buzzed
in by the guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. At
least, they looked like policemen. Once inside the
Venetian-palazzo-style building, the men ordered the guard to step away
from the emergency buzzer, his only link to the outside world. They
handcuffed him and another guard and tied them up in the basement. For
the next 81 minutes, the thieves raided the museum’s treasure-filled
galleries. Then they loaded up a vehicle waiting outside and
disappeared.
Later that morning, the day guard arrived for his shift and
discovered spaces on the walls where paintings should have been.
Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” Vermeer’s “The Concert,”
Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” and five works by Edgar Degas were missing. In
some places, empty frames were still hanging, the priceless works
crudely sliced out.
It was an appalling attack on a beloved museum, the personal
collection of an eccentric heiress who handpicked the works on travels
through Europe in the 1890s. The crime sparked a sweeping multinational
investigation by the museum, the FBI, and numerous private parties. To
date, the Gardner heist is the largest property theft in U.S.
history—experts have assessed the current value of the stolen art at
more than $600 million. Twenty-three years later, the case remains
unsolved.
In fact, not a single painting has been recovered. But this past
March, the FBI signaled that it was close to solving the mystery.
Officials announced that investigations had uncovered new information
about the thieves and the East Coast organized crime syndicates to which
they belonged. The art world buzzed over the news, yet one man doubted
what he heard.
Bob Wittman belongs to an elite society—the handful of government and
private-sector professionals who track down art criminals and recover
stolen work all over the world. Art theft is a $6 to $8 billion annual
industry, and it’s the fourth-largest crime worldwide, according to the
FBI. As an agent on the FBI’s Art Crime Team, Wittman spent two years
working undercover on the Gardner case before he retired. He believes he
knows where the art is. And right now, he says, the FBI is “barking up
the wrong tree.”

Grooming an Art Detective

Wittman, 58, grew up in Baltimore, the son of an American father and a
Japanese mother who worked as antique dealers specializing in Japanese
pieces. “When I was 15, I knew the difference between Imari and Kutani
ceramics,” Wittman says. He applied for work with the FBI because he
admired the agency’s investigations into civil rights abuses. In 1988,
he started on the property-crime beat, before moving into art theft. The
agency’s Art Crime Team was created in 2004; Wittman was a founding
member.
Originally established to recover cultural treasures looted from Iraq
after the U.S. invasion, the Art Crime Team now includes 14 agents
assigned to different regions of the country. Some members possess
knowledge of the field when they join. Others begin as art illiterates.
Regardless, all recruits receive extensive training from curators,
dealers, and collectors to beef up their understanding of the art
business. Even Wittman, with his background in antiquities, underwent
art schooling. After he recovered his first pieces of stolen art in the
late ’80s and early ’90s—a Rodin sculpture and a 50-pound crystal ball
from Beijing’s Forbidden City—the FBI sent him to the Barnes Foundation,
a Philadelphia art institution. “When you can discuss what makes a
Cézanne a Cézanne, you can move in the art underworld,” he says.
Educating the agents has paid off. In its decade of operation, the FBI’s
Art Crime Team has recovered 2,650 items valued at more than $150
million.
Of course, not every piece the team chases down is glamorous. Nearly
25 percent of the Art Crime Team’s job is hunting down non-unique items,
such as prints and collectibles. “These works can be concealed and
eventually nudged back into the open market easily,” Wittman says. The
finds are less sexy but represent a sizable black market.
Then there are the masterpieces. The most famous examples are Da
Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” which was recovered 28 months after the painting
was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Munch created four versions of the painting, two of which have been
stolen and recovered in the past 20 years alone. But the problem for
crooks is that it’s nearly impossible to sell such an iconic work on the
open market, except to a rich art lover who wants to savor it in a
locked basement. So why steal the pieces if they’re so hard to unload?
According to Geoffrey Kelly, a Boston-based member of the FBI’s Art
Crime Team, “art thieves are like any other thieves.” They use these
famous works as collateral in drug or moneylaundering deals. More
importantly, the pieces can be used as bargaining chips for plea deals
in case the crooks are busted down the line. “It might be difficult to
fill suitcases with $100 million in cash,” Kelly says. “But you can hold
a $50 million piece of art in your hand. It’s valuable and portable.”
There’s another reason thieves favor this line of work: Art crime
isn’t high on a prosecutor’s to-do list. “The rewards are good, and the
penalties are small versus dealing drugs or money laundering,” says
Turbo Paul Hendry, a reformed British art thief, who now serves as an
intermediary between law enforcement and the underworld. “Stealing a
million pounds’ [$1.62 million] worth of art will get you only two years
max jail time, not including plea bargaining and cooperating,” Hendry
says. The harder part is actually nabbing a thief. And according to
Wittman, there are only two ways to catch one.
None of the FBI’s cloak-and-dagger tricks would work without “the
bump” or “the vouch.” As Wittman explains, a vouch involves employing an
informant or a cooperating criminal to introduce you to an art
trafficker, finessing you into his inner circle. A bump, which is rarer
but more cinematic, refers to the spycraft of appearing to bump into a
trafficker randomly and then engaging him in conversation.
Insinuating yourself into the underworld and cultivating such ties
involves careful preparation and plenty of travel. Wittman, who retired
from the FBI in 2008 and now heads a private-sector art investigation
and security firm, estimates that he spent a third of last year in hotel
rooms. That may sound excessive, but the travel is key. Over a 20-year
period, Wittman says, he recovered more than $300 million worth of
stolen art and cultural relics, including Native American artifacts and
the diary of a key Nazi operative. “My life was always a hunt,” he says.
“We’d be totally immersed in one case, then right on to the next
one—whatever trail was hot was the one we’d pick up on. I’d have four
different cell phones to play four different roles.”
Wittman’s sweetest triumph came in 2005. He posed as an art
authenticator for the Russian mob in order to retrieve a $35 million
Rembrandt stolen from the national museum in Sweden. In Wittman’s 2010
memoir, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures,
he recounts the arrest in the case, which unfolded in a tiny hotel room
in Copenhagen. “We started to race for the door and heard the key card
click again,” Wittman writes. “This time, it banged open violently. Six
large Danes with bulletproof vests dashed past me, gang tackling Kadhum
and Kostov onto the bed. I raced out, the Rembrandt pressed to my
chest.” Wittman savors that victory, and he expected an equally
thrilling conclusion to the Gardner case, especially once a crook
offered to sell him the paintings.

Unraveling the Gardner Puzzle

For all its sophistication, the Gardner theft has baffled
investigators because the heist was so crudely carried out. The thieves
left behind some of the museum’s most valuable works, including Titian’s
“The Rape of Europa.” The slicing of two Rembrandts from their frames
suggests they were unaware that damaging a work of art sinks its value.
“They knew how to steal, but they were art stupid,” Wittman says. “They
probably thought they could sell them off for five to 10 percent of
their value. But no real art buyer is going to pay $350,000 for hot art
that they can’t ever sell.”
The other element that makes the Gardner case unusual is its
longevity. “What’s really suspicious,” Wittman says, “is that even
though a generation has passed, not one single object has resurfaced on
the market.” For those who believe that some or all of the works have
been destroyed, Kelly, of the Art Crime Team, begs to differ. “That
rarely happens,” he says. “Because the one trump card a criminal
holds when he’s arrested is that he has access to stolen art.”
In spring 2006, Wittman followed a lead that brought him closer to
the art than any investigator has come to date. While in Paris for a
conference about undercover law enforcement, he received a tip from a
French policeman. Through wiretaps, French authorities had been
monitoring a pair of suspects. Wittman calls the men “Laurenz” and
“Sunny.” French police claimed that the men had ties to the mob in
Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean known for its affiliation
with organized crime. Now they were living in Miami. The police
suspected the two were linked to the Gardner theft because, as a sign of
Corsican pride, the thieves had stolen the finial off a Napoleonic flag
hanging in the museum. (Napoleon was Corsican.)
Using the vouch method, a French cop working undercover told Laurenz,
who had been an underworld money launderer back in France, that Wittman
was a gray-market art broker. Wittman flew to Miami, using the alias
Bob Clay. Wittman and Laurenz picked up Sunny at Miami International
Airport in Laurenz’s Rolls-Royce. In his book, Wittman describes Sunny
as “a short, plump man of 50, his brown mullet matted. … As soon as we
[left the airport and] hit the fresh Florida air, Sunny lit a Marlboro.”
An FBI surveillance team followed in slow pursuit.
The three men went to dinner at La Goulue, an upscale bistro north of
Miami Beach. They ordered seafood. During the meal, Laurenz vouched for
Wittman, telling Sunny that he and Wittman had met years ago at an art
gallery in South Beach. The next morning, the men met again, this time
for bagels. Sunny asked Laurenz and Wittman to remove the batteries from
their phones, ensuring that their conversation would be private.
Sunny then looked at Wittman and said, “I can get you three or
four paintings. A Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and a Monet.” The paintings,
Sunny explained, had been stolen several years earlier.
“From where?” Wittman asked.
“A museum in the U.S., I think,” said Sunny. “We have them, and so for 10 million they are yours.”
“Yeah, of course,” Wittman replied before qualifying the statement:
“If your paintings are real, if you’ve got a Vermeer and a Rembrandt.”
The pieces all seemed to fit.
Over the next year, the three men met several times in Miami. Wittman
didn’t think Laurenz and Sunny had robbed the Gardner; they were more
likely freelance fences. He couldn’t discern what their allegiance might
be, but he knew that this was the trail that would lead to the missing
art. “I was playing Laurenz, and Laurenz thought that he and I were
playing Sunny,” Wittman writes in his book. “I’m sure Laurenz had his
own angles thought out. And Sunny? Who knew what really went through his
mind?”
The ruse went on. Working with U.S. cops, Wittman concocted an
elaborate fake art deal, taking the Frenchmen to a yacht moored in
Miami. The vessel was stocked with bikini-clad undercover cops who were
dancing and eating strawberries. Onboard, Wittman, as Bob Clay, sold
fake paintings to fake Colombian drug dealers for $1.2 million.
Wittman continued to negotiate with Sunny for the Rembrandt and the
Vermeer until an unrelated bust threatened to derail his work. French
police nabbed the art-theft ring to which Laurenz and Sunny belonged.
The group had stolen two Picassos worth $66 million from the artist’s
granddaughter, and shortly after the arrests, goons from the
organization showed up in Miami. They wanted to talk to Wittman.
Before the meeting, which would take place in a Miami hotel bar,
Wittman stashed two guns in his pockets. Laurenz or Sunny had nicknamed
one thug—a white man with long stringy dark hair and a crooked
nose—“Vanilla.” “Chocolate” was black and bald and wore braces. He was
built like a linebacker and was known to be good with a knife. Over
drinks, the thugs accused Wittman of being a cop. He countered by saying
the FBI was on his back, threatening his art-broker reputation. He
finessed his way through the conversation and survived the encounter,
his cover intact. But it wouldn’t be for long.
A year later, after busting a second art-theft ring on another job,
this one in a museum in Nice, French authorities inadvertently revealed
Wittman’s cover. All his hard work was blown. In Priceless, he
writes: “Bureaucracies and turf fighting on both sides of the Atlantic
had destroyed the best chance in a decade to rescue the Gardner
paintings.”
Today, despite the FBI’s public statement, the fate of the works
seems as mysterious as ever. Wittman believes the paintings are in
Europe. “They’ve been dispersed,” he says. He doubts the FBI actually
knows who the original thieves are. “That’s bogus,” he says. “It’s a
smokescreen to crowdsource leads.”
The FBI takes issue with Wittman’s comments. “When we said in March
that we had the identities of the Gardner thieves, that was definitely
not a bluff,” says Boston-based FBI special agent Greg Comcowich, who
stresses that Wittman is no longer with the agency. “Speculating at this
point is not acceptable,” he says. Comcowich says another agent
tracked down the French agent who worked closely on the Gardner case
with Wittman. “He told me Wittman was telling a fairy tale,” Comcowich
says.
Wittman maintains that he had an opportunity to crack the case and
admits that it has passed. Reminiscing about the experience, Wittman
writes, “[It] was all part of an expanding wilderness of mirrors.” And
in that carnival of intrigue, where the promise of treasure offered
little more than errant leads and misdirection, Wittman still marvels
that he and the FBI ever came so close to returning the art to its
rightful home.
- Art Hostage Comments:
With this latest spat between Robert Wittman and his former bosses at the FBI it is little wonder no-one has stepped forward with the offer of help on solving the Gardner Art Heist case or indeed assistance in the recovery of the elusive Gardner paintings.

Lets look at the facts behind the case. First, back in 1998 William Youngworth offered help to recover the Gardner art if he could get immunity and the $5 million reward offered by the Gardner Museum. The FBI then embarked on a campaign that saw William Youngworth jailed for three years as leverage to try and provoke William Youngworth to reveal what he knew without any immunity or promise of the so called reward. That failed.

Then Robert Gentile, a made man in the Mafia was asked if he could help recover the Gardner art to which he also sought immunity and the $5 million reward offered by the Gardner museum. Again no offer was forthcoming and the FBI used an informant to set up Robert Gentile so they could pressurise Gentile into revealing what he knew.
Again this failed and Gentile awaits sentence for dealing in prescription medicine and possession of guns.

Furthermore, the so called reward offer by the Gardner Museum is $5 million for ALL of the stolen paintings recovered In Good Condition, despite the undisputed fact some were cut from their frames, therefore the condition would not have been good from the get-go. Furthermore, what if a single Gardner painting or two or three were recovered, would there be a delay until ALL Gardner artworks were recovered? Yet another hook/condition designed to deceive perhaps?

Many well respected and experienced professional people associated with the art crime business think the reward offer by the Gardner Museum is bogus and the "Good condition" clause is there to deceive and prevent the Gardner Museum from being liable to payout if and when the paintings were recovered. The "ALL" recovered is also another condition to the alleged reward offer that prevents anyone stepping forward with information because that may only lead to recovery of a single, two or three Gardner art works.

Second, the so called immunity offer by the Boston D.A. office was explained by Boston Assistant D.A. Brian Kelly during the IFAR meeting in New York back in March 2010 when he explained that anyone seeking the immunity would have to give up their right to take the fifth amendment, meaning they would lose their right to silence and would be required to reveal all they knew about the whereabouts of the Gardner art and who has been in possession of the Gardner art.
Furthermore anyone seeking immunity would also be required to testify against those in possession of the Gardner art.

Therefore it is little wonder no-one has stepped forward with an offer of help to recover the Gardner art given the track history of those who have tired before and all the conditions.

The only possible solution to demonstrate any semblance of sincerity to be accepted by an evermore sceptical public and anyone who may have information that helps recover the Gardner art would be for a clarification of the immunity offer and also a distinct clarification of the reward offer by the Gardner Museum.

Anything less just re-enforces the allegations that both the immunity offer and reward offers are bogus and designed to deceive.

1 comment:

A carrot on a stick, the misleading prize and promises of immunity are likely not just ways to dredge up info. but also to connect the dots — circles of informants lead to networks of connections.

Doesn't that keep the risk involved in theft high? Just as you've prescribed. And the rewards small. Just as you've prescribed.

So now, as potential informants see a pattern of two and keep away, investigators will have to switch carrots. But that's not to say nothing was gained; they may have connected more dots than are obvious.